Creeds and Confessions, Dan McClellan Continued

Frustration With Twitter Disappearing Posts and a Prayer Request for Tom Pennington

Well, greetings and welcome. I was just looking at Twitter and I am not obviously the only one experiencing this. I am so maddened by the fact that you'll sit there and you'll be reading something and it just disappears.

It just, it's gone. Poof. Refreshes, it's gone. You'll never find it again. You try to find it, can't find it. It just disappears. It's getting me that close to go, oh, forget this. It really is. Porn bot stuff, never a problem for me.

I've never had it popping up or anything like that, but that is enough to drive me crazy. It really is. You know, you scroll along, find something, you get three sentences into it and it's gone. You'll never find it again.

Just poof. So, I'm a little hesitant to say this, but I was reading a tweet that I was asking for prayer for Tom Pennington, Countryside Bible there in Texas. It said that he's had a heart attack. I can't even, and I got to that point and poof, gone.

No way to find it. Don't know who posted it. So, I can't verify that. So, Tom, if you're great, sorry, someone said something, but that's sort of unlikely. It's probably much more likely that it was real and I just can't find it again because you can't find anything on Twitter.

That's how it works. So, we definitely need to pray for our brother along those lines. I've had the opportunity of speaking there a couple of times in the past and it's a very important church. Of course, I think by the end of next week, we're going to have a really good idea where the Southern Baptist Convention is going to be going.

If you know anything about history, you know that every single one of the rainbow denominations that we see today, where their churches are closing down right, left, center, they're not going to exist 30 years from now.

You see the videos and there's 15 people in the congregation. If they didn't have the money left over from believers from past generations, they wouldn't even exist. Every single one of them, every single one of them started by rejecting biblical parameters of sufficiency.

What do I mean by that? We are only given the qualifications for men to be elders in the church of Christ. We are not given qualifications for women elders. We're not given qualifications for sacerdotal priests and that's why we don't believe in those things.

Once you go, well, yeah, okay, we're given stuff for men, but that doesn't mean we need to have it for women. The path has been paved, the gate has been kicked open, and you're going to be the United Methodists, you're going to be the Episcopalians, you're going to be ELCA, PCUSA, just, you know, the list is long.

UCC, which was, you know, went apostate a century ago, but there you go. We'll pretty much know by then next week. Don't forget right now, in the month of June, a raffle going on for the... I'm trying to come up with a name.

Okay, this is the ESV creeds and confessions, which we're going to be talking about right now from Jeffrey Rice.

The word is layered cross. It's a layered cross. We realize it's a layered cross,.

Okay, that we all get, we see the layers, we get that, but it's a.

A Pierce original? A Pierceistian? No, it's not a Pierce original. I, Dennehy Designs did the design. I used their template. Let's not do that.

Okay, we'll come up with, I'm sure Twitter will be able to help me out with an appropriate name.

And remember, the Bible is, it's not Isaac line, it's... Isaiah line. Isaiah line, yes, there you go. Okay,.

Creeds, Confessions, and Biblical Sufficiency

We will be getting back to Dan McClellan on not just the textual issue, but when I was writing up the last program, and I was trying to find the link to that video on YouTube, I ended up running across a bunch of stuff he's done promoting the revisionist understanding of homosexuality.

And it's a great illustration of how to do scholarship anachronistically, backwards, well, the entire revisionist stuff is. But again, I'm sitting here, as I think about, I'm sitting here going, how, if someone had told me, as we were wrapping up the first time we were in Salt Lake City, passing out tracts at the general conference, the LDS church, if someone had told me that in a certain number of years, the majority of the Salt Lake City council would be LGBTQ, that there would be LGBTQ organizations on campus at BYU, I would have looked at you and gone, that's not possible.

Mormonism presents a theology of a gendered physical God. Male and female, the cis-gendered reality of human history is hardwired into LDS theology. I mean, it's one of the main things that makes Mormonism completely separate from Christianity, is their God is an exalted man.

God, men, and angels are all the same being. And yet that's where we are. How'd that happen? And I think people like Dan McClellan are the people who are mainstreaming this stuff into the Mormon mind.

And since Mormonism has always been so deeply subjective, burning in the bosom, it's always been disconnected from history. Had to be. It did it purposefully. Purposefully. All the creeds of abomination were not connected to them.

Nope. There was no priesthood from the time there to restoration, and so there's this big gap. So there's no solid foundation for standing against this cultural revolution within Mormonism, and it's just collapsing around it.

And I think Dan McClellan is an example of that, and we'll look at some of that over time. But first things first, I wanted to... Okay, there it is. Oh, it's over here. That's why it's not popping up.

I wanted to... This is something I... I think this was posted around the 30th of May, so it's been a little over a week. Brad Flossen from the Master's Seminary posted a thread, a 13-tweet thread, on the subject of this graphic.

And I've seen this graphic before. You'll notice that what you have here, what it says down at the bottom, I know it's rather small there, these historical documents do not replace the Bible. They protect the soundness of biblical interpretation.

Creeds and confessions of faith are useful tools which keep the church from repeating age-old heresies. So you've got interpretation with history. You've got creeds, confessions of faith, and then you've got going pretty much all the same direction with a few variations.

Interpretation without history and no creeds and confessions, the Bible, and it goes every which direction, and you end up way out here someplace, and that kind of stuff. So this is the image, and Dr. Flossen asked what he's got here.

Every so often this diagram makes the rounds. On the one hand, I appreciate the concern it shows for sound doctrine. The interpretation of scripture is not a free-for-all. I also appreciate the attempt it makes to show the role of secondary authorities in God's economy.

God has instituted the Fellowship of Believers, Acts 1711, and the Office of Elders, Titus 1 .9, as important means the validation and invalidation of claimed interpretations of scripture. However, I believe the diagram raises more questions than it answers.

Number one, which creeds and confessions? And that's one of the first thoughts I had, first time I saw this, is which creeds, which confessions of faith? It's just so vague and general that all you can make is a vague and general argument.

You can't get specific, and hence you can't make applications. So are we talking about the Westminster Confession of Faith? Are we talking about the London Mass Confession? Are we talking about the 39 Articles?

Heidelberg? What? Which ones and which creeds? I would assume everybody would say, oh, the Nicene Creed. Okay, it says creeds. Chalcedon. Okay. Ephesus. Constantinople. So the expansion of the Nicene Creed to Constantinople.

Okay. Nicaea, too. And that's generally when the wheels fall off, because the vast majority of Protestants are going to go, yeah, no. Okay, why? And on what basis? So which creeds and confessions? No one argues that all of them function this way in any practical sense.

Someone might. It would be much more helpful if proponents would list the creeds and confessions they have in mind within those blue arrows. Until then, it's just theoretical. And that's exactly right.

It is just theoretical. Since the guardrails must be selected from among many options, who has the authority to make this choice? Who gets to make that choice? The individual interpreter? If not, then who has the authority to require this of the interpreter?

So if you're looking at, because it says the Bible, and you've got these arrows, and so I'd assume what that means is you have Colossians chapter 1 and its testimony to Christ's centrality in creation.

So is the idea, well, that needs to be interpreted in the light of the Nicene Creed? Or does Colossians chapter 1 give rise to the impetus behind and the definition of the Nicene Creed? These are things a lot of people never think about.

And one of the reasons that I wanted to walk through this is in my experience. And mine is not a universal experience, but I have been involved in apologetics for 40 years. And so I do have a little bit more than the average bear's experience in this area.

And in that experience, I would say that the individuals who are most likely to really emphasize a graphic like this and want to press it upon us are the same people that I have never seen active in the apologetic realm.

In other words, they're primarily interacting with people in their own space, in their own echo chamber. And so you can sort of get over the making the choices about creeds and confessions because, well, we're all using the same ones anyways.

Well, what happens when you wander outside of your particular school, your particular classroom, your particular Facebook group, and you start trying to talk with people who have very different creeds and confessions than you are even familiar with?

I mean, it just seems to me that a lot of people who make a lot of claims about this kind of stuff don't have any idea what was going on before, during, and after, for example, Nicaea II or Chalceda. So you've got books by Roman Catholics.

Here is Leo Donald Davis' The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. So you can pick up stuff like this. And this one's not, I mean, trying to cover seven ecumenical councils in that many pages is obviously going to be very basic, but the vast majority of people that I know have not even read something like this, let alone the Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea and the condemnations, the canons, and stuff like that that come afterwards, and the condemnation, the anathema upon anyone who would reject the propriety of the veneration of images, all that kind of stuff.

I don't hear these people even showing much of a familiarity, let alone interacting with people who actually accept that kind of thing. So that's why when I read this when it was first posted on May 30th, I'm like, yeah, these are the questions that make people very, very uncomfortable, but they are the questions that must be asked.

So if not, then who has the authority to require this of the interpreter, the one who proposes the diagram in the first place? So is the diagram promoter saying, and I'll tell you which creeds and confessions of faith will fulfill my diagram?

What are the criteria for selecting which creeds and confessions are to be held as authoritative? If the answer is the Bible, then the diagram fails to portray this adequately. If the answer is something else, that something needs to be acknowledged.

So how do you determine it? I mean, they're standing on the Bible. So how does the Bible do that? Because it wasn't all that long ago we were talking about certain people who were being promoted heavily amongst conservative reformed folks in the United States being told, you have to read the Bible through the lens of the Nicene Creed.

Okay, but which came first? And that's going to be something that Dr. Clausen brings up. The contrast between the two diagrams leads to the conclusion that the Bible lacks its own internal guardrails to protect interpreters from error.

These guardrails are something that another authority must provide, because the image on the right, you still have the Bible down there, but the creeds and confessions are gone, and so there's nothing there.

Everything just goes wacky, just goes flying off into nowhere, resulting in the conclusion conclusion that the Bible in and of itself is insufficient. If you're handling the Bible correctly, you're not going to come up with the idea of the church.

You're not going to have elders. What? I don't know. So he says these guardrails are something that another authority must provide. How does this impact the sufficiency of scripture? That's a real good question.

How does it impact the sufficiency of scripture? Where does that end up going? Number five, it is illegal to remove or tamper with guardrails on a freeway. Analogously, are the selected creeds and confessions to be treated at a practical level as unassailable, unquestionable?

When I dared to go, you know, there's a historical background to, well, even the Council of Nicaea, there's a historical background. Part of the argumentation that took place at the time was due to the fact that there had been previous councils.

They were local councils. And of course, the idea of local versus ecumenical, it's anachronistic. No one was thinking that way back then. But especially in the East, they had struggled with modalism, the various forms of modalism, Sabellianism, Patrapassionism, what we call oneness theology today.

And they had rejected some of the language that the council wanted to use to try to affirm the deity of Christ. So there's a historical background. Well, what do you do with that? What do you do with the political influence, the ever-increasing political influence in each council as it comes into existence?

Because that is not even arguable. The, what we would call secular authorities, they weren't secular in the modern sense, but the political authorities of the time, specifically emperors and empresses, along with popes and prelates and archbishops, and especially as the Western Empire is collapsing, the Bishop of Rome inherits tremendous political power.

As the Western part of the empire disappears, he's left standing there holding the keys, basically. And so that's going to lead to all sorts of problems, degradations during the pornography, then the rise of the huge papal names that had emperors standing outside their doors begging for their forgiveness.

That's going to come later on. But politics increased in its importance all the way through from council to council to council. And when you can literally look at a creed from a council and go, okay, this phrase was demanded by this political power.

And this phrase was to keep this group from splitting away from the council. And this phrase represents the people who wanted this person to have a say in these things. We can do that, especially with later councils.

We can figure out where this stuff was coming from. If you say that becomes infallibly authoritative and cannot be questioned, then you have to admit that there are sources outside of scripture that are vitally important, that are never mentioned in scripture itself.

You can't hold the soul of scripture. You cannot hold the sufficiency of scripture. You can't do it. But there are people who want to pretend they're going to try, but that's why they're not doing any debates like that.

They don't want to go up against someone who can press them to go, are you sure about that? What of those who want to remove just a poll here and a panel there, is it acceptable? Are not the creeds and confessions themselves still interpreted?

Do the current debates not show that even those who confess various creeds and confessions still disagree among themselves on certain nuances stated within these authorities? Well, that's a given that, unfortunately, again, very few people give thought to, because if you've never even read the proceedings, especially the later councils, then you're hardly going to be in a position to be aware of the differences of interpretation.

But the more complex the question being addressed, the more likely it is that the answer you're going to give is liable to be being interpreted in other ways. So, yeah, regarding the content of the creeds and confessions, point number seven, by the way, what about the commentary that is the canons that goes with them?

This is something I've asked many, many times. And a lot of people don't give it a second thought, because they haven't bothered to read any of it. I mean, you know, in 1993, was it four? Anyway, 30 years ago or so, I was doing a debate in Boston College, somewhere around this time of year, with Scott Butler and Robertson Janus, and they're trying to pull out literally the Arabic version of, was it Canon 28 or Canon 6 at Nicaea?

I think it was Canon 6 at Nicaea. Anyway, the point is, they're pulling foreign language versions of the canons as a means of trying to get around what these canons meant in their original language and original context.

And again, most folks that are promoting this stuff, they don't engage with people like that. They're not going to encounter that kind of stuff, to even have to give it a thought. So, I've often said, it seems to me that when people say, well, you know, you just need to give implicit obedience to this stuff.

And it's like, okay, so you're supposed to ignore the historical context, and you're supposed to read the confessions in a way that the writers of the confessions never intended them to be read, because they intended to be read within the context of the canons.

Right? Is that not a given? And I don't think most people can argue it, because it's just not something that people think about or ever given much thought to. So, Dr. Clawson goes on, are those part, the canons, are those part of the guardrails?

I know I can pretty much answer that for the people who wrote the creeds, confession, the creeds, and the canons for the councils. Their answer would be, of course they are. Of course they are. But the vast majority of us do not function on that.

And my point is, maybe we're inconsistent. And if so, why are we? And are we consistently inconsistent? And I would say that we are. In other words, we are holding these to the higher standard of scripture itself.

So, we're being consistent along those lines, but that separates us from the fact that as the creeds and as the councils became ever more authoritative in their pronouncements, they were ever more that far removed from the authority of scripture.

For example, he says, the canons of the seventh ecumenical council, second Nicene, that's the one we like to pick on because it's the most obvious one, which anathematized those who rejected icons. And it did.

And it didn't do it in a couple words. It goes all out. And most of us will be sitting here going, I don't even understand what's going on here. Yeah, that's the point, I'm afraid. Number eight, how does this diagram differ from all the guardrails instituted by the scribes and Pharisees for the interpretation and application of the Old Testament?

Did Jesus condemn them merely for selecting the wrong guardrails? For example, see Mark 7. Mark 7, the Corban rule, you invalidate the word of God for the sake of your traditions, et cetera, et cetera.

So, that takes us back to a biblical example. The largest bodies of confessional Christians, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodoxy, some mainline Protestants, would generally agree with this diagram, yet they are whitewashed tombs filled with spiritual death.

Where did the diagram fail with them? So, there's all sorts of creeds and confessions, but the creeds and confessions didn't stop indulgences, did they? In fact, it was the elevation of creeds and confessions to a unbiblical level of authority that laid the foundation for the definition.

The definitions of merit and grace and development of purgatory and all this stuff that becomes this foundation that eventually builds up to where you can have concepts such as indulgence. So, where did the diagram fail with them?

There's a good question for you. Was faithful Bible interpretation possible before the selected creeds and confessions were universally published? So, even if we don't identify which creeds and confessions we're specifically referring to here, was faithful Bible interpretation possible before they were universally published?

If so, how and why is it and why is that still not possible today? What has changed? So, in other words, if you could accurately interpret the Bible, let's say five years after the Council of Constantinople.

So, let's say 386. Was faithful Bible interpretation possible before selected creeds and confessions were universally published? So, could you properly interpret the Bible before the Council of Chalcedon?

Before Pope Leo wrote his tome, could you faithfully interpret scripture in that context? And if you could, then what has changed if you can't do it any longer? Now, I think these are really important things to think through.

You're not just throwing it out there to make people uncomfortable. You're throwing it out there because it's important. He concludes by saying, again, I do affirm the role of secondary authorities. I must.

The Bible itself teaches me so. But lesser authorities must never obscure the perfection, clarity, sufficiency, or necessity of the ultimate authority. God's word. Let's do better with diagrams, is what he says at that particular point.

And so, yeah, I think those are important questions that everyone should be thinking through on a regular basis. And especially those who... Brian just posted a screenshot from the program here today.

Oh no, that's not today. That's actually from the last program, I recognize. The shirt's similar, but not quite. Just one of my many colorful summer shirts. We hit 112 yesterday, which again, that's 10 stinking degrees below the all-time high.

And right now, it's as dry as a bone out there. So it's like, it doesn't really get hot here. 122 is hot, okay? And that was toward the end of June, June 26th, 1990. But once the monsoon starts and the humidity, it gets ugly.

South Mountain Sunrise and a Return to Riding

All right, so I'll take this thing out of here. Thank you for that. I was going to do this at beginning. We'll do it here really quickly. This morning, how do I get that full screen? This morning, I did something I have not done for a very, very, very, very, very, very long time.

And I honestly, I'm wondering why it has been so long. But I dragged myself out of bed at like 3 .15, and I drove down to South Mountain Park. I used to do this all the time. And those of you like Algo will remember me saying over and over again, yeah, I was riding to South Mountain today.

I was listening to Shabir Ali, and Shabir Ali said X, or I remember I was in South Mountain when I heard Bart Ehrman for the first time basically say that if God had inspired the Bible, he would have made sure there weren't any textual variants.

And I'm sort of like, what's he going to do? Cause the scribe who's about to make a mistake to spontaneously combust? I mean, what is this stuff? And I remember pretty much what curve I was on because the climb up to the towers at South Mountain is a steep and technical climb and certainly a very technical descent.

And so it's a place I used to go all the time. I've been there. I was there when we set our all time. I think we eclipsed this last year. We set our all time high low of 96. I think we hit 97 last year.

So that's been a clip. So I think that was like, I forgot what year it was, but I had my peachy cruiser. I remember that. And I was climbing South Mountain in the dark when we, when we did that, it was, it was hot.

Um, so anyway, I am only, I'm less than three weeks out from my last surgery. And I'm really looking forward to Colorado. I'm really looking forward to riding up there. I'm trying to moderate my zeal and excitement because I know that I can wake up tomorrow morning and it's starting all over again.

And you know, the whole thing gets trashed, but right now I'm just trying to do my best to recover my fitness before this trip and hopefully some debates and things like that. But there are certain mountains in Colorado.

I just love riding a bike up and down. And so the only way to really start preparing for that is to ride South Mountain. And so this morning I get down there, you can only get in there, you know, things have changed.

There used to be, you know, uh, uh, some guy who works down there would have to come down and open the gate at five o 'clock and stuff like that. It's all computerized. Now there's a little led sign, you know, and spot on a five opens up.

And, uh, so, you know, things have, things have changed a bit over the years. And, um, so you go rushing through there, you know, get the bike as quick as you can because the sun's going to be coming up.

And once the sun starts hitting you, um, and we set a record for the date last night for the record high low, it wasn't the all-time record high low, but the, the temperature last night was the highest that ever been on that date for the low in the morning.

So I knew I needed to get up there and get this done and get back. Cause I haven't, none of us have been doing a whole lot out in the heat. It just hasn't been all that hot until just recently. So I'm starting my climb up, uh, toward where it turns and starts becoming really steep.

And I always wear a rear view mirror and I notice it's really orange behind me, my rear view mirror. And I saw like, Whoa, that looks like a really nice sunrise. So I just stopped pedaling, pull over real quick, pull the cell phone out of my back pocket.

And I'm literally just put on and I'm sort of doing this number. I mean, I, I can't turn all the way around cause I'm facing the other direction on the bike. And I just, I'm just sort of hitting a few, you know, get, get, get a few pictures.

We'll see what comes of it later. Well, you can see here what I got. And not only is that stunning as far as the color goes, but look at, look at that. Now that's called four peaks, uh, out there in the long distance.

And that's man, how far is four peaks from here? That is a long ways. That's many, many miles. And so I've already climbed enough to have just enough altitude to be able to see that. But I mean, you could, you could sit out there and set up a camera and still not capture that, that particular timing, uh, as far as the, uh, as the, as it coming up over the, so here's, Oh, that's not what I want.

There we go. Um, I mean, that is just, wow, that's really, really nice. I was like, once I saw that as I was driving home, I'm like, wow, that's, um, that's impressive. So some of you may recall back in the olden days, um, that I would post, um, sunset or sun sunrise pictures all the time.

Cause I was out listening to the Hadith or whatever else I was doing. And, um, haven't done that for a couple of years because that was the first time I've ridden in South mountain in two years. It was July of 2022 was the last time I was there.

And I, I, I really, I feel really guilty now.

What we should make that the background in the rig for the show, that would be really cool. But how would we do that? Well, okay. So you remember when we were at G3, we had the pop-up things that, okay, we can have those custom made just the perfect width.

You'd drop it on the couch and then just pull it up and then drop it down when you're driving. We could. Yes,.

Yes. That would work. That would look totally cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think what we need.

To do is look a whole lot better than that light you have. That's the whole reason you're talking.

About that. And, and I know that. So I think we do that with the brick background and because the sun, the sun, the sunrise just, yeah, it's just, no, it would, it would, it'd be amazing. Yeah. So get the brick one.

Cause I have the, I have, I have the brick one. Yeah,.

But you can't fold it up as custom and all that because we would send the image to the company.

I know that they would print the thing for us. I know, I know, I know how they do it. I know, I know how they do it. So we can, we can find a brick to have them do that with, it would work. And that, that would be the best way.

Cause I'm not sure I can't figure out how to do the one I can be. It could, it should be able to be done. Let's talk about it another time that Pete, that the rest of the audience doesn't need to be involved in this discussion at all.

Once I see him pull that microphone up, then I know we've got, we've got issues. So, all right, we're going back to Dan McClellan here and the geeky stuff. Remember the last time we were together, we, um, we're listening to Dan McClellan who introduces himself as I am a Bible scholar.

Okay. That's nice. Um, great. Um, and he is a Mormon, which one of the really interesting things for me is if you're going to apply critical methodology to the Bible, then I just don't see how the book of Mormon or the doctrine covenants program price.

I mean, the book of Abraham, I haven't done a search of Dan McClellan's videos, but I would just be fascinated if he's actually addressed the book of Abraham, because wow, I just don't even, I don't know how anybody can look at that and go, Oh yeah, that Abraham wrote that.

Right. Okay. So anyways, he's talking about, remember last time somebody put out a thing about, you know, how many manuscripts there were and 99 .5 accuracy. And I criticized it. It was poorly expressed, poorly argued, poorly constructed.

This was not well done at all. And so, you know, people say, yeah, you're picking on low hanging fruit. Well, all right. Um, we're, we're not right here, but he definitely is in his response. So let's pick up pretty much where we were, uh, with what he, uh, has to say of the new Testament.

The Manuscript Evidence for the New Testament and the "Black Hole" in Textual Criticism

We have maybe 124 manuscripts. Okay. So that's, that's in the first 300 years. And it would be good if he would say, and in comparison to pretty much any other work of antiquity, that's far more, we have far earlier attestation.

I could play you the clip from my debate with Bart Ehrman, where he said, we have far earlier attestation for the new Testament than for any other work of antiquity. And that's, that's not even questionable.

Um, unfortunately, a lot of times people don't really, um, give you that in the whole,.

The whole rest of it. Maybe three of them contain the entire new Testament. And those all come at the very end of that window. Our earliest manuscript of any kind dates to about 125 CE contains like 36 or 37 words of the tens of thousands of words in the new, in the new Testament.

Okay. Now that one bothered me. I'm sorry. Um, my, uh, connection to the, uh, cameras outside has, uh, has died. It's been problematic all day actually, but, um, getting it going here. Once, once I see, once I see that the cars out on the road are frozen in place, I've sort of figured that I'm no longer seeing, uh, stuff like that.

And you might go, why do you need to see that stuff? Cause we live in Phoenix. Um, and, um, it was only once, but I did catch someone trying to steal Rich's car once. And, um, so we, we do keep an eye on things.

Um, so back to Dan McClellan. So what he just said was the earliest goes to about 125. I don't know why he uses the CE thing, but, um, anyway, and I know what he's talking about. And he says that it only contains like 37, 38 words out of all the words of the new Testament.

And I'm like, okay, like I said, I don't get a feeling he's familiar with CBGM. And I don't care if you call yourself a Bible scholar, I can tell when somebody doesn't do text criticism, but has read, you know, has had to read about some of it, but doesn't actually do it because, uh, yeah, I know I just put them up there, bring them down a second.

Um, here is, um, uh, there it is. Here's what he's talking about. Okay. And we've looked at this before. And those of you who've seen my debate with Bart Ehrman know that I was wearing a tie, uh, that featured these images, um, during that particular debate.

And this is manuscript P52, and it is very small. It's about the size of a credit card. You're seeing both sides of it, recto versa. Um, and you can sort of tell this was up toward the top of the page because you can see the top margin of above it.

Uh, in my presentation on the reliability of the New Testament, I give you a, I wrap the rest of the text around this, so you can see how it would have looked. But yeah, there are very few words there.

Does that lessen the value of the manuscript? Well, it depends on what you want the manuscript to be doing. If we want a full manuscript of the Gospel of John from AD 125, then yeah. But why is this so important?

And why can a small fragment like this be so vitally important that we should be quite excited about it? Well, the answer is given in the reality that what you have here, it's not what it's from, though it is from the Gospel of John.

And the irony is most of modern scholarship would say Mark is the first Gospel, and then Matthew and Luke copy from Mark, and then John, uh, and then John's written long, long, long after that. That raises far more questions than it actually answers, but we won't get into that right now.

We've talked about in the past. It is from John. John is the earliest attested of the Gospels as far as its manuscript tradition is concerned. Okay, someone might argue a particular fragment over here from Matthew or something like that, but in general.

And it's not that it's from John chapter 18, 31 -34 on one side, 37 -38 on the back side, which is fascinating because that's Jesus's conversation with Pilate, where Pilate says, what is truth? I've really found it providential that this manuscript, this little fragment would be from that section, given the skepticism that has been expressed toward the Gospels as a whole or the Gospel of John in particular.

No, the issue is this. This demonstrates that the Gospel of John, in the form we have it today, inclusive of the 18th chapter and its interaction of Jesus with the Romans and all the important stuff that goes with that, was already in circulation and being copied in the first quarter of the second century.

And when you recognize, as I said last time, the all-out effort on the part of the Roman Empire to destroy the New Testament, to destroy the Christian scriptures, you look at this little piece of papyrus, and if you lived in the year 125, and you were making a copy of the Gospel of John, and you're sitting there having a conversation with somebody else, and that one guy, we all have those friends, go to that one guy, this one guy goes, hey, I just had a thought.

I wonder, what's the chance that the papyrus you're writing on right now could last for 2 ,000 years? And you're just trying to do an accurate copy of what you're copying. You don't even want to get into this.

But what would be the chance of all the copies of the Gospel of John? And there had to be a lot of them. You know how we know there had to be a lot of them? Because Christianity grew, and the Romans destroyed thousands and thousands and thousands of manuscripts.

And so there had to have been a lot of them for them to be destroying all of them. So what would the chance be that this little fragment would end up in the basement in London, having been brought from Egypt, when the British stole everything from Egypt, so as to be recognized by some guy who's leafing through all these fragments in the basement?